Posted
by
timothyon Saturday February 22, 2014 @02:33PM
from the prices-convey-information dept.

kc123 writes with this except from Bloomberg News: "Microsoft is cutting the price of Windows 8.1 by 70 percent for makers of low-cost computers and tablets as they try to fend off cheaper rivals like Google's Chromebooks, people familiar with the program said. Manufacturers will be charged $15 to license Windows 8.1 and preinstall it on devices that retail for less than $250, instead of the usual fee of $50. The discount will apply to any products that meet the price limit, with no restrictions on the size or type of device."

I'd think so too, if I were pirating it from an unknown source. But sites like The Pirate Bay have comment threads attached to their linked warez, and people do chime in when they find unexpected malware. So you only download well-seeded isos that have lengthy comment threads praising them. Downloading software from a robust and well populated community of peers is fairly safe. Given that malware makes it into commercial distributions often enough, it's probably as good a place to download an OS as any

I once tried something that looked interesting - there were two torrents apparently for the same program - virtually identical up to the name of the large single-file.exe installer - but one of them was like 50 kB larger or so. I didn't need the program but I got extremely curious as to what was the extra value. So I downloaded it and ran it in a nice safe sandbox. Well, would you guess? There was a nice trojan in it for free. Apparently, that was the only difference. So I commented on it, attaching the hashes of the offensive file to warn everyone. As I reloaded the page two minutes later or so, the whole torrent (the TPB entry, that is) was gone! I have no idea if the uploader did that, or if someone watches this, but it was *suspiciously* fast. Strange event, that one.

Why would anyone pay for something that is required to make things work?

That is exactly how I feel too! In order to get MS Office to work, they claim I need a product key. Ha! Product key, Scmoduct Key.

I was also told that in order to get Ender's Game to work on my TV screen I needed to buy a digital copy off of Amazon Prime for $19.99. Oh these silly people. Luckily I know how to make this stuff work without their help.

Hrmm, a serious risk that may be. Perhaps you should avoid using any publicly-funded roads, utilities, or services in order to keep the idea in proper perspective, after all you're probably not paying anything close to your per-capita fair share of the tax burden for any of those things.

Presumably an amount commensurate with their usage of the services in question. A good first approximation would be total tax dollars spent on the service divided by total number of citizens using the service (since most subsidies tend to go to fixed infrastructure costs). Though you could easily argue that things like police and military disproportionately serve the interests of the wealthiest citizens, and thus it's perfectly reasonable that they pay the vast majority of the cost.

"It'll fail" is the usual prognostic when a company starts a price race with their competitors... But in this case, the competitors are already giving their product away for free. This is much worse than a usual race to the bottom.

I bought two copies for $15 each back when it first came out (promotion lasted for 6 months, was considering buying more just in case). Went from Windows 7 Home permium to Windows 8 Pro. Wasn't too bad of a purchase: 1) it's faster in games, 2) it comes with Hyper-V, 3) non-English language support (especially Chinese and Japanese) is much better than Windows 7. So what about Metro? What Metro? I have Classic Shell installed so I never see it.

3) non-English language support (especially Chinese and Japanese) is much better than Windows 7.

Are you a walking ad? You're concerned about support for English, Chinese, Japanese, and another language too?

Many people have no use for that particular feature; but (if you are one of the unlucky souls consigned to a need to know about the arcana of Windows licensing) it's actually somewhat notable: Language support has traditionally served as a market segmentation mechanism: can't have filthy non-corporations engaging in international arbitrage trading, now can we? So companies (including MS with earlier versions of Windows under many of their assorted licensing schemes) have tended to gimp multi-language suppor

Yet another reason not to use windows. The other commercial OS has supported multiple languages for free for over a decade.... Windows UTF-8 support is a joke and it causes me a lot of grief. I really wish my company would go all Google and ban windows but alas they have not. Using windows really is like jumping in a time machine, you can see what computing was like 15 years ago.

I don't use the metro ui for anything on my desktop - that said - while I think Windows 8.1 is more responsive than 7 or XP, it does have a lot of usability issues, but its not debilitating.

I honestly think OSX (yes I have an airbook running mavericks:)) and the plethora of Linux desktops have about as many problems with usability - the shame with Windows is that Windows 7's UI was pretty much perfect.

If every user of stock windows 8 does not notice Metro... They need to seek medical attention immediately.

I think you meant something along the lines of "Not everyone hates Metro". But to be clear and fair, its the first thing any one with eyes will notice, and as such it deserves all the criticism it gets.

Yeah, there are some great things about windows 8 that does get lost by most users due to the Fkup that is metro. But this is how it is with Microsoft, great improvements behind the scenes get overlooked

1) You can't add an administrative user without using the metro user app to create the user and follow up by switching to the desktop app to promote the user to administrator. How stupid is that?

2) No more safe mode with F8. What happens when Microsoft Windows update installs a fscked up video driver (like it did to one of the machines I worked on) and it no longer boots with video? 8.x has to boot to working WINDOWS to force a reboot into safe mode. How stupid is that? I guess we'll never need to go to safe mode unless Windows is working properly. Sheesh

3) That God awful abortion of "fast shutdown and startup." Good luck getting rid of root kits and virii if you don't know the tricks to get Windows to actually reboot the system.

4) Windows 8.x shills and apologists always point out that installing "classic shell" or "start8" makes it usable. Why in God's name should an end user be forced to install third party software to repair the functionality intentionally gutted by Microsoft? The last Lenovo I worked on came with a replacement start menu app preinstalled. Of course, the Windows 8.1 update removed it. Which is 8.x? A half-ass desktop OS or a half-ass tablet OS?

I could go on, but you get the picture. Windows 8.x's user interface and user experience are a piece of shit. I don't care if it plays games or copies files faster. I wouldn't pay for it if it was $15. I wouldn't use it if it was free. Every time I am handed a 8.x machine, I think there is no way it could suck more than I have already seen. Every single time, it proves me wrong.

One unwanted side effect I can see coming from this, is that most Windows devices will become either very cheap (to meet the price guideline) or very expensive. If you build a device costing $500, the cheaper devices are not going to be that much lower in spec than you because they didn't have to eat a more expensive Windows license.

When I read this story, I was excited because I thought it meant cheaper Windows for home users. I wouldn't mind running Windows 8 in Parallels on my mac, or even dual boot to it to play games. But the price for consumers is just too high for me to do that. They could get a lot of casual Windows sales and remain relevant but for some reason, they just don't seem interested in doing so.

and you'll be seeing under powered devices flood the market in hopes of gaining the $35/unit savings offered because to meet that price point there's not lots of hardware to run the full Windows 8.x OS. So we will see lots of dissatisfaction with performance much like what happened when netbook vendors switched from Linux to Windows XP. So more damage to the Microsoft brand and more customers running away disgusted.

Slowest hardware that can run Windows 8.1 will be 22nm Atom or AMD 1.0GHz dual core, with 2GB memory (4GB can be likely), and either 64GB flash or a modern hard drive. Decoding of youtube videos done in hardware when the vids are in H264 (dunno about VP9)There just doesn't exist crappier hardware on the market. Well, 32nm Atom sucks but Microsoft can exclude it from the agreement. So Windows 8 is guaranteed to work fine!

The difference is just 35$. That is going to kill the middle tier devices? Being a windows box is going to be a bigger disadvantage than 35$ for that 500$ device. Basic problem is there is no killer must have app for that mythical 500$ device. Penny pinchers want a simple sub 200$ machine. Bells and whistles fanboi\s don't care that much about the price.

The problem for Microsoft is that it sells only to corporations and gamers. Both are not as price conscious as home users. But it has to fight a rear guard action to keep the home user in the fold. Otherwise they taste competing OS and see how others do it and demand Microsoft's feet to fire. They demand interoperability. There are people who have more powerful computing platforms in their pockets iPhones/androids/tablets than the corporation provided desktop they work on. The company workstation PC is hampered by layers and layers of IT clunkiness loaded on top of Microsoft cluelessness. I think this 15$ is just a PR stunt to fool the stock analysts, in reality Microsoft would be giving OS away for free without telling analysts.

The difference is just 35$. That is going to kill the middle tier devices? Being a windows box is going to be a bigger disadvantage than 35$ for that 500$ device.

Most hardware OEMs have margins thin enough that 7% ($35) will easily make a difference between a profitable device and a money-loser on a $500 product.A sub-$300 device is even worse, with that $35 making up at least 11.5% of the total at $300, and growing as the overall price goes down.

Seriously - the only lap/desktop/tablet OEM that has decent margins is Apple, and they obviously don't ship Windows with their products.

I was going to post the same thing but you laid it out perfectly. If you think about component costs in a $500 system, $35 buys you either better parts or something you wouldn't have otherwise, and like you say there is no margin on middle tier PC's.

That's why I think it will mean more focus on either $250- systems, or $1000+ systems.

The truth from the consumer's perspective, though, is that the consumer will likely look at more than just a $15 price difference when assessing the value proposition between a $699 HP and a $684 Dell.

The truth from the consumer's perspective, though, is that the consumer will likely look at more than just a $15 price difference when assessing the value proposition between a $699 HP and a $684 Dell.

Sales for both of those will suffer when people can buy a $250 device with similar specs.

I'm not saying there will be no middle tier stuff, but focus will shift away from those.

This explains the rash of $249 PC's I've seen recently. The $300 PC market just became the $250 PC market. There's just not enough meat left on the bone, after paying the full boat Windows license, to make a $300 box better enough than a $250 box to justify the incremental cost, in the eyes of the typical "cost senstive" consumer who's actually buying these crap-can PC's. Aside from the bottom-feeder Celeron and AMD E-xxx CPU's already common at these price-points, OEM's will cheap out on fit/finsh, put few

At retail, $35 can get you 2GB of RAM from somebody you might actually respect, 4 from somebody who probably doesn't just sneak into competitors' factories at night to steal the stuff that failed QC...

$35 is also, depending on the phase of the moon and where you fall in AMD and Nvidia's release cycles, enough to get you bumped a tier or two in GPU capability. HDDs are a similar story, you aren't going to do anything radical for $35 bucks(say a switch form cheap 'n capacious HDD to screaming-fast SSD); but you can probably squeeze 1 'unit' of additional capacity, exactly how many gigs that is depending on the conditions of the day and whether you are buying HDD or SSD, out of your vendor for $35.

The less-visible-at retail stuff like fit-and-finish, case materials, what gets to be metal and what gets to be plastic, are harder for me to comment on; but 'just $35' can likely buy you 1 'bump' in any of the major spec areas, or some additional classiness in build quality. Especially if your ass is being kicked on industrial design grounds, or user dissatisfaction with your failure prone PSUs, that's not something to dismiss lightly...

That's $35 of "components" money, the manufacturer will want to make its usual 5% (or whatever) over it, then the distributor will want to make their usual 10%, but he'll also need insurance, what's paid over the product value, increasing it some extra 1% or 2%, then the store wants its usual 20% over the cumulative value... And lets not forget the government (whatever it is) taking taxes over revenue (they seem to be always there, it does not matter if you think your tax code is modern because you have a V

Given how much volume (if not necessarily profit) is handled by the middle tier, I'd be a bit surprised if all the major OEMs aren't having a...forceful...chat with MS right now about a licensing deal that either has more tiers, or is directly based on 'x percent of cost, capped at $y'.

It certainly makes no sense at all for a $250 device to have a $50 Windows license attached to it(regardless of what MS, or anybody else, wants); but it also isn't obviously in either MS' interest, or in the PC OEM's inter

They sat on their laurels too long under Ballmer and watched the market expand while they sat on the sidelines. They laughed at the iPhone when it first came out. Rather than putting Office on the iPad, they held it hostage to "protect" Windows. Five plus years later, they may finally do it. How much revenue did they give up there?

They chased Google with Bing. They've chased Apple with the Zune, their music store, and their Windows Phone. They put the name Windows on everything - their cloud, their phone, their ARM tablet, and their regular PC OS, even though all those products are different. They are a MESS. Good luck to Satya - he will need it.

Judging by the price hikes for enterprise lixensing, it seems.Redmond plans on making up the difference by picking their busines customers' pockets.

Too many more price hikes and I'll take the pain of moving to Samba. I've already decided Exchange 2010 is the last Exchange server I will put in my organisation, and now that I've become a partner I finally have the clout to make it stick.

I can't see moving from Windows workstations but I can gut the backend.

Samba4 works pretty well. The main place it still fails to deliver is replication of the SYSVOL, which is where your GPOs are stored. You have to make sure to only edit GPOs on a single server, then make sure to synchronize those files to all of the other domain controllers. It's not difficult, just not out-of-the-box easy.

For a single-server shop, Samba4 is a good choice (even for migration away from a Windows server). For sites where you need more then one DC, there's still room for improvement.

You would definitely know better than I about what it can and can't do, I'm just surprised to hear that SYSVOL replication, rather than any of the zillions of arcane MS-specific behaviors scattered across AD, would be the notable issue: Given the OSS-community love of building tools, I would have expected exactly the opposite: a situation where Samba4 plugs GPO storage and SYSVOL right into the capable hands of one or more of the modern revision control systems, offering lovely automatic versioning of all G

Judging by the price hikes for enterprise lixensing, it seems.Redmond plans on making up the difference by picking their busines customers' pockets.

True, but how much longer will that last? Sure, enterprises are stuck in some aspects (e.g. Oracle costs way more than SQL Server), but not in others, especially as those price hikes have customers exploring alternatives (e.g. PostgreSQL), and trimming way the hell back on the rest of the EA, or even delaying renewal altogether in some cases.

After all, I'm seeing an EA renewal coming up, and here's what I'm thinking:* I don't have to upgrade existing SQL 2k8 boxes if they still run just fine, and can likely

They're a mess that had $77.85B in revenue last year ($21.86B net), $68B cash-in-hand, and one of the two or three best brands in the world. It will still be a tall order, but you don't need luck when you have those kind of resources.

The fact that the iPhone was (initially) very expensive, and exclusive to only one of the four major carriers, which greatly limited the initial market uptake. The "all screen" form factor, which eschewed the physical keyboard, was also seen with much skepticism initially. In the mid 2000's, when the iPhone was in gestation, Microsoft had all it could do putting out the twin fires of getting Longhorn (Vista) out the door, and patching the (barn door size) holes in XP's security. Though the decision proved c

Microsoft Becoming Desperate to Sell Window 8.1Microsoft Losing Badly in Tablet MarketChromebooks Out of Microsoft's Extortionary ReachMicrosoft Discovers Battery Life Is Very Important On TabletsMicrosoft Is Getting "Scroogled"Microsoft Just Got the Facts

Microsoft is actually doing quite well with their current batch of tablets, with most models being sold out at many locations. They know battery life is important, and that's why their newest surface tablet runs for 10+ hours on a single charge.Not that many people are buying Chromebooks, and many of those who are, are buying one just to install Linux on it anyway. They may not have caught up to the iPad yet, but they actually have quite a strong product offering, especially if you look at the various table

Microsoft is actually doing quite well with their current batch of tablets, with most models being sold out at many locations.

Easy to do with inventory manipulation, and it has two benefits. One, you aren't stuck with warehouses full of product that you have to practically give away to get rid off, like when HP dropped the price of the TouchPad to $100. Two, you get a headline of "Widget Sells Out", which is free advertizing and gives the illusion that the product is in demand.

I would love to see Windows on BeagleBone Black. It would show that even cheap devices get the love of Windows and open the Windows store. Also it would look great for kids to experiment with Windows on a $45 computer. At the very least Microsoft could release that micro-kernel version of Windows for hobby/development devices and open up Visual Studio for development.

Things like the RPi and the BBB bode well for the future of Linux and other free or mostly free OSes. Personally I would much rather see kids learning about computers on hardware running an OS that can be studied, picked apart, and modified as desired.

I say this as somebody whose main computer runs OS/X which is a closed (or at least semi-closed) system. I'm quite content not to have it on a BBB.

Oh and just curious. Have you spent much time working with linux and/or open source development tools? Visual Studio is very slick and refined but there's an astonishing amount of things in the open source world to aid a software developer. So much so that I'd never long for Windows on a BBB.

I can only marvel at Google at its strategic moves. Sun tried to fight Microsoft with Java and got clobbered. Google rightly realized as long as MSOffice is delivering cash like a firehose, it would be impossible to fight it. It went on a long term plan with bare mininal Google Docs, then with Google apps to pinch the money supply. It leveraged the connectivity by making collaboration front and center of office tools. Microsoft did not reduce price fast enough, or introduce network features fast enough. They were resting in laurels and now MsOffice monopoly does not look as monolithic as it did when we were discussing the ODF vs OOXML fights.

It participated in the spectrum auction and made the telcos pay near market rates. It bought dark strands of the fiber network after the market crash to protect itself from local last mile ISPs from holding it for ransom.

It talked to WhatsApp, made an offer of 10 billion with lots of poison pills. It set the floor at 10 billion, leaving all the smaller players aside. It knew Facebook was despo and will buy WhatsApp, but it boosted the price and made Facebook pay dearlym 35% of cash on hand!. Please disregard the 19 billion dollar figure. That is based on overpriced FB stock price. That Facebook will be strapped for money in the coming year for other aquisitions is the key victory for Google.

WhatsApp's 450 million users includes millions who create new accounts every year when their old free for the first year accounts expire. Those users are penny, nay, paisa pinchers who use WhatsApp to avoid international texting charges between India and the Gulf countries and Singapore. They use WhatsApp to broadcast their texts to N recipients paying 1 outgoing text charge. In India incoming calls and texts must be free by law. Only the sender pays. 2 dollar per user? You can't chisel 2 rupees out of them. Anyway WhatsApp has no advantage when it comes to smartphones. Its explosive growth was due to it being the portal to the intenet for dumb phones via SMS. That market is done.

Unorganized linux tried to scare Microsoft with netbooks. Microsoft hit back and evenutally killed the netbooks market, though it had to extend XP's life to do so. But Google resurrected the netbooks markets, and is forcing Microsoft to engage in price war again. Given the drop dead simplicity of the Chromebook, and low cost by eschewing the bells and whistles of the tablet market, it is very difficult to see anyone make any serious money off them. But it hampers the others from raising their profit margins.

They don't hit a home run every time they swing the bat, nor did Steve Jobs, Scott McNealy, or Steve Ballmer. But Google knows when to cut their losses and move on; Jobs was also very good at that, McNealy and Ballmer not so much. It's too early to tell with Zuckerburg, but the GP presents a good argument that he's in the process of blowing it.

I see you've established a career in missing the point. First, the list of dropped Google products is a non sequitur when talking about Google's strategies against its rivals. It's like dismissing Apple's iOS moves because they stopped making the Cube years ago. Second, Google not caring about making a big profit on a product can be a feature, not a bug, if doing so cuts their rivals off at their knees. Like the aforementioned examples of Chromebooks and Go

How is Microsoft a Rival though? They absolutely dominate the ad market. Microsoft has almost no presence in the ad market. Chromebooks are a novel experiment but I don't see them threatening Microsoft in the slightest. After all you can run Chrome on a Windows 8 device (for $15 now even).

I see GoogleDocs as an effort to grab some stragglers but it doesn't seem to be a big money maker or a large enough investment on Google's part to warrant Microsoft's attention. After all the Office division is sti

Some of what you write is true, the rest pure bollocks!
Whatsapp does not work on most feature phones - the Nokia Asha series is an exception. Its used primarily on Smartphones - even in India. On a Smartphone there is no reason to text message...that part is true.
Heavy text message users - in India and other countries - still use text messages. A basic 2G/3G package will cost Rs 100 a month - plus the added cost of the smart phone - for most users.

Except maybe Windows FLP, which is not for sale for any price to anyone not having corporate licenses and its use is discouraged by Microsoft. Windows Embedded 8 is a fucking pig and is fucking useless. It's within 5 percent of the size of a full version of 7 or 8 and all of the resource use as a full version of 7 or 8.x. Why bother?

"Small devices?" According to who? Microsoft's idea of a small device isn't anyone else's that I know of.

Not to question Microsoft's business model, but why are they doing this. Windows is their core product. Everything they do is based on people buying windows and then office. This is ".com" logic, where they take a profitable product and then make a business model that is cheaper and makes no money. I don't use Microsoft products unless I have to, but this is not a recipe for success. Why don't they make something that people want? Is this a way to inflate license sales of windows 8 to consumer goods because

Still comes with a horridly insecure browser integrated into the OS that is incompatible with their previous browsers and enterprise web apps and cannot be removed. Still prohibits preinstall of alternative browsers, search engines. Still prefers Outlook.com sign in. Is still Windows. Seems like they still have a few issues to work through.

They did the same with netbooks. Discounted to $15, then used the $15 price to force the OEM to reduce the specs. Once they got the specs to the point of garbage and sales started to drop off they raised the price a bit, rinse and repeat until the entire market is gone. That's what happened to netbooks, incredibly popular until MS deliberately destroyed the hardware requirements so that no on wanted them anymore. Everyone that bought a netbook and hated it? That was Microsoft ensuring they were underpowered pieces of garbage.

One of the key purposes of Windows 8 was to start raising hardware requirements. Laptops under $250 shouldn't be part of the Windows ecosystem, they shouldn't exist. Microsoft should be glad to lose them. This price cut is going to give a huge advantage to devices under $250 and create a void between $250-400. Bad, bad inconsistent.... If anything they should be doing the opposite. Make Window 8 $150 on cheap devices and maybe free or even subsidize expensive devices. They need to drive their custome

When you have a monopoly, you can hold prices high, and that means that you provide 1 purchase and 5 pirate copies.When the price is reasonable $15.00, users would rather pay, than pirate. It is an affordable rate. Perhaps that will result in a 1 to 2 ration instead of a 1 to 5 ratio.

Free as in beer... Apple has wisely realized that most users care more about the user experience, and having the system meet their needs, then they do about the nebulous freedom RMS says they need to care about more than these the actual, you know, usefulness of their device. Besides, running OSX on non-Apple hardware is a violation of the software's EULA...

iTunes is a grotesque abortion, which would make access to data on the necessary protocols and interfaces to get your non-fucked software talking to components that expect iTunes useful.

Thankfully it matters less with iDevices, now that those all have network connections of their own; but it's slightly tragic how much remains locked up from that 'iTunesU' fad, where Apple managed to convince a bunch of schools that the best podcasts are ones that you can only get to with Apple software, and which are onl

To Apple's credit, they do release more than they are legally obliged to (unlike the assorted assholes who will fight the SFLC to the last man over some penny-ante hack to a GPL2 package in a router probably worth less than $20 of their lawyer's hourly rate, for reasons that defy human understanding).

Of course, Apple is a practically canonical example of the (not bad, certainly pragmatic, and arguably a lot healthier than doing a lot of dumb reinventing of the wheel) 'Use OSS to lower the cost of providi

As much as I'm pleased to (for the newer gear) not have to fuck around with innumerable license keys and so on, Apple licensing is actually obnoxiously inflexible, and very consumer oriented. At work, I've become the mac-wrangler-by-default because most of the rest of the department are Microsofties from way back. Fine by me, more variety, more experience, all good. And the desktop and laptop gear is pretty good. Impressive industrial design, not too many freaky issues (though opendirectory is still a pale shadow of ActiveDirectory and Group Policies. Those things can be a byzantine mess; but they sure are powerful).

However, there are some rough edges: You need to buy new gear to replace or expand an existing lab/laptop rollout? Well kid, I'm afraid that Apple's OS support is as follows: The earliest supported OS is whatever the machine shipped with. The last supported OS is the version before the version that has your model in the 'installer will refuse to try' list. Oh, you wanted to expand a lab running OSX version N-1 without upgrading the entire lab to version N? That's so sad, good luck.

Even more vexingly, Apple has largely left the server business (they don't have a single device with redundant PSUs, their 'preferred' OSX Server config is a mac mini with two HDDs); but they steadfastly refuse to simply sell licenses that 'bless' VM instances(not running on physical macs) to run OSX Server. For $1000, they'll ship me their little mini, with its two laptop drives and OSX Server; but they don't even offer a 'keep your shiny little toy and enjoy the higher margins, just let me spin an OSX VM on my institution's preexisting, high-reliability, physically-distributed, high-uptime, SAN-backed, etc, etc. VM infrastructure. We have the cores, we have the RAM (with ECC and stuff, crazy!), we have the SAN, with the fancy disk monitoring and redundancy features. Why won't you take our damn money?

Regarding the selling of VM licenses: Apple is primarily a hardware company. Yes, they make software, but that's just to make the hardware work better and look shinier, and thus more appealing to consumers. The fact that you can "only get that software on pricy Apple hardware" is, arguably, the major pillar propping up the sales of their well-made, but outrageously pricy hardware. The "Hackintosh" phenomenon has already demonstrated that, if you're not concerned about slick industrial design (or EULA compli

Not that it's a real problem, Linux is a decent embedded OS(arguably markedly worse than some designed for the purpose at Hardcore Embedded Stuff; but familiarity and smooth scaling from fairly tiny embedded systems to supercomputers counts for a lot); but the 'ChromeOS' is something of a historical irony:

Remember, back in '95, when Marc Andreessen threatened that Netscape would reduce Windows to a "poorly debugged set of device drivers"? That struck MS as plausible enough that they squished Netscape as hard as they could and (slowly) got off their ass on IE development; but look upon ChromeOS, and observe the OS reduced to a set of device drivers by the browser..

The hilarious thing about this is that there's someone as MS who has decided that the best way to approach the problem of Android/ChromeOS taking their market share is to... compete on price. Because that's going to work isn't it?

Cost of ownership is more than the price of the actual software. Microsoft isn't out of the woods yet, but don't kid yourself if you think they don't have the staff, support, and mindshare to roll out something that lots of people want to use.

Google is a very casual operation with regard to the software they provide to consumers. Android is rather fragmented now, and you only see ChromeOS being sold on the lowest-price but also lowest-end hardware on a retailer's shelf. And Google's history of abandoning

These devices still need the expensive storage, memory and processor required to support Windows. Competitors don't. They are limited to the peripherals Microsoft supports. Competitors aren't. OEMs of Windows devices have to share design plans with their direct competitor Microsoft for platform testing. Makers of alternatives don't. Platforms that qualify have a maximum price, alternatives don't. These are still important issues.

You're doing it wrong. For pure Unix, you need to start with a SysV source license. It's a little more work that way, but the results should be more than worth it!:D

Of course, it might be a bit tricky to get your hands on one at the moment, since owner Novell had a tiny falling out with exclusive license reseller SCO. Still, you might be able to pick one up on the second-hand market. I understand that Daimler-Chrysler has one they're no longer using--at least according to their response to SCO's subpoena.